Weekly Reader: The Jane Austen Book Club by Karen Joy Fowler; Cute Romantic, but Fluffy Love Letter to Austen's Work

Weekly Reader: The Jane Austen Book Club by Karen Joy Fowler; Cute Romantic, but Fluffy Love Letter to Austen's Work

By Julie Sara Porter

Bookworm Reviews




PopSugar Reading Challenge: A book about a book club

Spoilers: Okay, I admit it. I am not by any means a fan of Jane Austen

At best, I find her books light fluffy romance, but nowhere near as well-written as other writers of her time like Charlotte Bronte or George Eliot. At worst, I find her overrated and her books and characters repetitive and borderline aggravating.


My personal experience with Austen's works are as follows: I find Emma humorous with a flawed but adorable and at times purposely annoying protagonist. Northanger Abbey is a lot of fun with its parody of Gothic literature. Sense and Sensibility, is okay but mostly average. Pride and Prejudice is  overrated with two annoying protagonists that are more annoying in their omnipresence (though more tolerable than those in Wuthering Heights). I am undecided on Mansfield Park and Persuasion since I have not read either. I have yet to read one of her books that I liked beyond.. .well just okay and many authors that I like better.




However, Jane Austen in February cannot be avoided. It's like cat videos and Top Ten lists on YouTube or Laura Brannigan's "Gloria" on St. Louis radio stations during hockey season. It's inevitable that Jane Austen and romance go together, so instead of ignoring it, might as well suck it up and enjoy it and read either one of her books or a book about her books.

In this case, I read The Jane Austen Book Club by Karen Joy Fowler. While I still am not a Jane Austen fan, I will always recommend any book that celebrates the importance of reading and where characters identity themselves with the situations that are found in books. On that level, I could not recommend The Jane Austen Book Club enough.

It is a fun cute lighter-than-fluff book that explores the troubled love lives of the members of the eponymous club. While it can be read and appreciated by any fans of romance, chick lit, or books about books, it will be best loved by fans of Jane Austen who will catch and enjoy the parallels between the characters and their literary counterparts.


The Book Club is started by best friends 40-somethings Jocelyn and Sylvia. Besides them the antendees are 28-year-old French teacher Prudie, Sylvia's lesbian thrill-seeker daughter, Allegra, Bernadette, a 50ish woman with multiple marriages to her credit, and Grigg, the lone male member. The six members are required to read all six of Austen's novels and one member has to lead the discussion and host the group at her or his house all while dealing with their own romances and problems.


The club members are a charming relatable bunch that play off each other very well. Many Readers will recognize the characters's personalities and quirks as people they may know or are. There is Jocelyn who loves to walk her Rhodesian Ridgebacks and is something of a control freak who likes to micromanage her friend's lives while ignoring her own lonely unmarried status. Sylvia is a recently divorced single mother who has been burned by love and is not eager to open herself up to the possibilities of another love.

Grigg prefers to live in the worlds of his favorite science fiction novels and conventions and often has trouble being the sole male among his three sisters and his new female friends, which causes him to be permanently friend zoned.

Bernadette loves to regale her friends with her colorful stories about her stage parents and her various flawed husbands with humor to disguise how lonely and troubled her life was. Allegra lives for exciting pastimes like skydiving and mountain climbing and being with women who give her an exciting hard time. Prudie is married, but can't ignore the advances that her students make towards her, nor her and her husband's many disagreements and annoying characteristics.


Fowler parallels each character with a specific Austen novel and the novel helps guide the character through their love lives. Jocelyn is compared to Emma with her desire to make matches with her friends. Like Emma Wodehouse, she sets her friend up with someone with whom she falls in love. She invites Grigg to the group to set him up with Sylvia, but realizes that she has fallen for him herself.

Meanwhile Grigg's interest in science fiction is much like Catherine Moreland's obsession with Gothic Romance novels in Northanger Abbey. Both use their preferred genres as means of escapism from complacent and conflicting reality. Grigg also uses his science fiction novels as means of communication, such as recommending Ursula K. LeGuin's novels to Jocelyn.

Allegra's literary counterparts is Marianne Dashwood in Sense and Sensibility. Like Marianne, Allegra is a woman of deep emotion who lives for new experiences. She doesn't always listen to the advice provided by her more sensible mother, especially when it comes to her relationship with her latest girlfriend, Corine. She suffers a near emotional breakdown when she learns that Corrine stole parts of her life for her writing inspiration. Even when she is in a new relationship in the end, there is much discussion whether this relationship will last.

Like Fanny Price of Mansfield Park, Prudie has to learn to face life on her own with the death of her mother. She also is permanently confused by the open flirtations around her while maintaining a deeper more loving connection with her husband.

Bernadette's story is like that of Elizabeth Bennett in Pride and Prejudice. As a child, she was used by her mother to achieve child stardom like Mrs. Bennett uses her daughters to find wealthy husbands. She also recognizes the stubborn pride and arrogant assumptions that filled her previous marriages. She is always ready with a quick word and witty comment like many of the most loquacious of Austen's characters.

Finally, Sylvia is compared to Anne Elliot of Persuasion, the oldest and final of Austen's protagonists. She too had been left alone and deserted by a former love. When she and her ex meet again, they have to consider how much they have changed and whether they want to sever all ties or get back together.

The book has the usual formulaic ending where characters are paired up and learn lessons. Some relationships are a bit abrupt and one might make modern Readers cringe more than it would have in Austen's day. But still it's a cute book, one that is good reading for Valentine's Day or for anyone who wants to read a book that celebrates a love of reading.

Like any good book about reading, the characters recognize themselves within the books. Jane Austen's novels provide escape and friendship as they discuss the plots, characters, and themes. They also provide their own answers towards their own lives and loves.

Weekly Reader: The Reading Group by Elizabeth Noble; A Great Book About the Importance of Reading and Friendship

Weekly Reader: The Reading Group by Elizabeth Noble; A Great Book About the Importance of Reading and Friendship
By Julie Sara Porter, Bookworm Reviews

Spoilers Ahead: Reading Groups and Book Clubs are great ways to share a love of books and also great ways to build friendships based on a mutual love of reading. Elizabeth Noble captures that friendship in her novel which explores a year in the lives of five English women as they discuss books and deal with the problems with the men, children, and other family members in their lives.

Each chapter begins with a synopsis of the book that the women are discussing and their spirited discussions about the books. The books that are discussed vary from Heartburn by Nora Ephron, My Antonia by Willa Cather, I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith, to The Girl with the Pearl Earring by Tracy Chevalier among others.

The women are honest, frank, and up front about the books, what they like and don't like, and how they relate to the books.
Their opinions differ from "I think she is definitely the most vivid, the most extraordinary woman character I can ever remember reading."(The Woman Who Walked Into Doors by Roddy Doyle) to "It had everything, drama, tension, mystery, rugged hero, arch villain." "You're making one of the great Gothic novels of all time sound like James Bond." (Rebecca by Daphne Du Maurier) to "I want a word with the twenty million people whose lives were changed by reading this book, according to the blurb on the back."(The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho-ouch).

Besides being simply a catalog of other books and other people's opinions of them, Noble doesn't lose track with her characters and their stories. The members of the group come to these books with their own baggage and concerns which they relate to the other members of the group.

There's Harriet, a mid-30's wife and mother who feels suffocated by her seemingly happy marriage and wondering for another life out there. Nicole, a stylish book editor and Harriet's best friend is suffering from an unhappy marriage with a frequent philandering husband. Polly is a 40ish single mother who has to deal with a rocky engagement and her daughter's pregnancy. Susan, Polly's best friend, is in conflict with her aging mother and estranged sister. Clare, the daughter of Susan's co-worker, is a midwife who longs for a child of her own.

Noble's characters are identifiable and relatable. They could be people we know like Harriet who has definite opinions about what she reads (Books about women by women) and the men in her life (exciting with some drama) and don't realize how good they have it until they are threatened with losing it from the injury of a child to the separation from a spouse. Harriet then makes the right decision to bring her family back together.

 We may also know many people like Nicole who are attractive and seem to live a successful happy life and are determined to keep it that way despite all evidence to the contrary, such a having an unwise pregnancy to keep her husband who has no interest in staying. (The resolution to this conflict is both moving when the pregnancy is terminated and ultimately satisfying when she stands up to her husband). These are real characters going through these difficult times.

There are plot points that don't work so well. The resolution to Susan's conflicts with her mother and sister comes out from nowhere and asks more questions than provides answers, though brings Susan and her sister together.
Clare disappears halfway from the book. She drops out of the group after discovering her husband impregnated one of his students, who happens to be Polly's daughter, Cressida. While it is natural in real life for people to drop from book clubs (albeit usually for less dramatic reasons), in fiction, a character's disappearance cries out for a real solution to their problem that is offered more than just by second hand dialogue. (Though she does well for herself working in a Children's Hospital in Romania and starting her own Book Club.)
The final chapter rushes all of the relationships quickly in an almost mad dash to the altar or the maternity ward to give all the characters a happy ending.

However, the characters' lives are transformed by the power of their friendship and the books. This point is made when one of the characters observe that all the books they read feature women who take control of their lives. They learn that they-Harriet, Nicole, Polly, Susan, and Clare- are those women.